First exercise your disk with your own code or with a simple write operation like writing files should be enough to test network saturation. When profiling reads instead of writes, call umount and mount to flush caches, or the read will seem instantaneous:

The first number is the number of threads available for servicing requests, and the the second number is the number of times that all threads have been needed. The remaining 10 numbers are a histogram showing how many seconds a certain fraction of the threads have been busy, starting with less than 10% of the threads and ending with more than 90% of the threads. If the last few numbers have accumulated a significant amount of time, then your server probably needs more threads.
Increase the number of threads used by the server to 16 by changing RPCNFSDCOUNT=16 in /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs

Invisible or stale files

If separate clients are sharing information through NFS disks, then you have special problems. You may delete a file on one client node and cause a different client to get a stale file handle. Different clients may have cached inconsistent versions of the same file. A single client may even create a file or directory and be unable to see it immediately. If these problems sound familiar, then you may want to adjust NFS caching parameters and code multiple attempts in your applications.

Introduction

In this tutorial we will set up a highly available server providing NFS services to clients. Should a server become unavailable, services provided by our cluster will continue to be available to users.